


The Point of No Return

by Scrawlers



Series: To Devour the Sun [5]
Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Anime)
Genre: Canon Divergence, Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-15
Updated: 2016-11-15
Packaged: 2018-08-31 04:14:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8563627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scrawlers/pseuds/Scrawlers
Summary: Alan infiltrates Aether Paradise in the dead of night in order to conduct a more hands-on, thorough investigation.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This AU is a canon divergence both from the end of the anime (and was planned/partially written before the XY&Z series ended, hence why Alan not only still has mega evolution, but uses it via special pendants that Professor Sycamore gave to him and Lizardon as gifts as mentioned in Part II of this series) and from the games themselves, which have not released yet. As I've stated in other entries, I expect most (if not all) of what I have going on in this AU is going to end up entirely jossed by the Sun & Moon games, but I planned it all out quite a while ago (in fact, a good chunk of this entry was written back on October 12th), so I ask you to forgive it and enjoy the ride nonetheless. As a few extra, gentle reminders, Alan is just over sixteen in this fic, and Gabrielle/Gabby is the nickname of Professor Sycamore's garchomp.

The front—and public—entrance to Aether Paradise was locked at 9:00 PM on the dot each night. All visitors to the facility were gently herded out by then, and guided to the ferries that would take them back to one of the main Alolan islands provided they didn’t have independent pokémon transport. Although the doors were locked, security lights still shined down over the front entrance, and smaller lights lit the path leading up to the double doors that provided entry to the facility during the day. Similar security lights were fastened to the walls around the rest of the building’s perimeter; each light was positioned an equal distance apart from the next, lighting every part of the facility in good measure and leaving no part cloaked in shadow.

Well, no part aside from the nondescript door in the very back.

On the exact opposite side from the main entrance there was a long stretch of the building coated in darkness, and along that darkened wall there was a singular door that blended almost seamlessly with the pristine steel exterior of the building. The handle was a silver knob, and next to the door there was a keypad that—when the cover was flipped up—glowed with a dull green light just barely noticeable in the darkness. This entrance was the entrance that Aether employees used after hours; Alan had seen quite a few of them come and go from it over the past two nights of his reconnaissance, and on the second night he had Lizardon land among the trees near the door so he could watch as one of the employees had punched a code into the keypad before they slipped discreetly through the door. It was a little funny, he thought, how every employee to use that entrance looked so cautious; they looked over their shoulders, and they never opened the door entirely. Most of them even took the time to shut it quietly behind them. As if a secret door in the back of the facility wasn’t already suspicious enough, their behavior made it triply so. Then again, given how he had watched them enter from the shadowy part of the trees (Lizardon recalled into his pokéball at the time so his flames wouldn’t give away their position), he supposed their caution wasn’t completely unwarranted.

Especially given that he planned to use the entrance himself on the third night of his investigation.

The idea of entering the Aether Paradise facility didn’t thrill him. On the contrary, as he and Lizardon once again landed among the trees (farther back this time, so Lizardon’s flames wouldn’t give them away despite not dispelling the mega evolution right away), Alan’s throat was dry and his heart was beating quickly enough to make him feel a little lightheaded. Judging from the attire of the Aether employees who used the back door, he was pretty certain that entrance led into the laboratory wing of the facility. That was good, at least as far as information gathering went; he had a strong suspicion that Lusamine wouldn’t have shown him and Manon the sanctuary areas of the facility if there was anything she was hiding there. If Aether was doing anything shady—if they really  _were_ malicious, no better than Flare—then whatever it was they were doing, and whatever it was that they had to hide, was sure to be in the laboratory wings of the facility.

But although he knew this, it didn’t make him any more eager to walk the halls than he had been two days ago when Lusamine had first given him and Manon that tour. It was necessary, he knew; he had gleaned all he could from aerial reconnaissance, there was (unsurprisingly) nothing suspicious to be found about the Aether Foundation online, and questioning Gladion earlier in the day had given him nothing more than a cryptic warning to stay away and a mild headache. He was officially out of other options. If he wanted a definitive answer about the Aether Foundation’s true motivations (and he more than wanted it—he  _needed_ it), then he would have to infiltrate their facility to investigate first-hand. It was the only way.

For the past several nights of reconnaissance, Alan had dressed in the darkest clothing he owned to make it that much harder for both he and Lizardon to be spotted. He had brought his traveling clothes with him to Alola on a last-minute decision in case they decided to hike up into the mountains, knowing that his jacket, pants, and boots would come in handy for the frigid temperatures that allowed ice-types like Alolan vulpix and ninetales to thrive. But while he hadn’t had to break out his traveling gear for hikes through snowy mountains, the ensemble came in handy when it came time to spy on the Aether Foundation from the night sky. His jacket, pants, and boots ranged from dark grey to black, and that—when combined with Lizardon’s jet scales after mega evolution—afforded him wonderful cover in the inky sky or pitch shadows of the surrounding trees.

But while his traveling clothes were appropriate for external reconnaissance, they would make him stand out worse than Gabrielle in a pichu playpen when it came to an internal investigation. That he imagined the laboratory wing to be as bright and shining as the rest of Aether Paradise aside, every Aether employee he saw entering the facility through the back door had been wearing some measure of a white uniform. Alan couldn’t replicate their uniform exactly—asking for one would tip them off, ambushing an employee would risk alerting others to his presence, and it wasn’t like the uniforms were sold in any of the shops in the archipelago—but he could still imitate it as closely as possible, requiring any employees who spotted him to give him at least a second glance before they got suspicious. So while he flew to Aether Paradise wearing his traveling gear, when he and Lizardon landed among the trees he had Lizardon make a temporary changing room with his wings so that he could swap his boots for his chucks, his dark pants for a pair of khakis, both of his traveling shirts for a single long-sleeved white one, and his dark traveling jacket for his hooded white lab coat. (The hood would stand out a bit, particularly given the orange lining, but it was the only lab coat he had and so it would have to do.) Once he was changed, he stowed his traveling clothes in the rucksack he had brought with him and dropped it at the base of a nearby tree. The rucksack, like everything else, was dark; even if someone did investigate the woods, it was unlikely they would find it, and the fact that he had never kept food in it before meant that wild pokémon were unlikely to mess with it either. Satisfied with this (and knowing that it was time, and he couldn’t put it off for any longer than he already had), he turned to Lizardon.

 _Ready?_ he asked, raising his eyebrows to get the question across without breaking their cover of silence. Lizardon nodded once in perfect understanding, and despite the way his nerves were wrestling themselves in his gut, Alan smiled a little as he recalled Lizardon before dropping his pokéball into the pocket of his lab coat. Alone among the trees now (and no longer having either the light or warmth of Lizardon’s flames present), Alan took a deep breath.

It was time. It was a little after 1:30 in the morning according to his watch, and it was time. There was no turning back.

There was not another soul present as Alan moved out from the shelter of the trees and approached the door. The wind didn’t so much as rustle the leaves on the trees, and when he flipped the keypad cover up to access the number pad beneath it, it made hardly a sound despite tapping back against the wall. It was eerie, really, but Alan forced himself to see it as fortunate rather than unsettling. The longer he went without encountering anyone, the better. If he was truly lucky, the entire trip could be spent with every Aether employee ignoring him in much the same way Lysandre’s employees always had before.

The keypad was small enough that Alan hadn’t been able to make out the details on it before, despite the faint green glow lighting up the number pad. But even if he hadn’t been able to make out the specific numbers, he had chosen a spot from the trees where he could watch the employees enter the code each time they used the back entrance, and he used that to his advantage now. He placed his fingers lightly over the middle row of the number pad, and closed his eyes. As clearly as he had seen them last night, he could visualize the employee now, and could follow the movements of the employee’s fingers with his own: middle finger to the top center key, ring finger to the top right key, middle finger to the bottom center key, index finger to the middle left key, ring finger to the top right key again, index finger to the bottom left, and—!

A soft  _click_ echoed from the lock on the door, and Alan smirked in faint satisfaction as he flipped the cover back down over the keypad and opened the door. His eidetic memory wasn’t something he prized on the daily, but there were times when it came in handy.

As expected, the back entrance opened into the laboratory wing. Unlike the main corridors in the public areas of Aether Paradise, the corridors of the laboratory wing were lit by bright fluorescent lights installed along the ceiling, gleaming off the equally as pristine chrome flooring and walls, as well as the stainless steel doors that led into each room. In all, the corridor was so polished and cold that it not only held a clinical appearance, but reminded Alan forcibly of Fleur-De-Lis Laboratories.

He sucked in another breath, balled his hands into fists in the pockets of his lab coat, and forced himself to start walking forward.

Given how unfamiliar Alan was with the laboratory wing of the Aether Paradise facility, he spent the first handful of minutes merely walking the corridors with an affected sense of purpose, checking each room as he passed it via the little windows installed at the top of each door to see if he could find one that both had a computer terminal and was empty. Most of the rooms failed him; either there were Aether employees conducting experiments of some kind within them, or the room was empty but didn’t have a computer in sight. But once he reached the end of the first corridor and started down the second (hanging a right based on gut instinct alone), he finally found an empty room with a computer monitor displayed up against the right wall, the CPU present at its base. After glancing both ways down the corridor to make sure no one would spot him (something reminiscent of the employees he had witnessed entering the building, he knew, but that couldn’t be helped), he slipped into the room and shut the door quietly behind him before crossing over to the computer terminal.

The computer terminal was on the higher-end of the technology scale, as Alan could have expected. The keyboard was nothing more than a series of lights across a flat steel surface that glowed to life like spider silk as he brushed his hands across it. The keyboard was lit up gold, and though the monitor had been dark when Alan had first entered the room, it flared to life with a pristine brightness that left him blinking, spots flashing in front of his eyes, for a few seconds in the sudden gleam. But as his eyes adjusted and the computer woke from Sleep Mode, it settled on a login screen requiring a password (the username having been set to an employee default). Alan considered it for a second before he smiled to himself, and palmed the USB drive he had borrowed ( _borrowed_ , because he fully planned on returning it before its absence was ever noticed) from Clemont out of the pocket of his lab coat.

When the Professor had first told him that they were going to travel to Alola with Meyer and his family because Meyer had “just so happened” to purchase tickets for an Alolan vacation at the same time (and on the same flight) as the Professor had purchased tickets for their research trip, Alan hadn’t thought much of it. He had known Meyer since he was a kid, given that Meyer and the Professor had been friends for so many years, and although he didn’t know Clemont or Bonnie that well yet, he did know that they had both been Ash’s traveling companions, and Bonnie adored him even if he still couldn’t figure out why. So he didn’t mind traveling with them, especially since he felt it was obvious that the Professor and Meyer were romantically involved, even if the Professor hadn’t outright told him as much yet. (That the Professor  _hadn’t_  outright said as much did bother Alan a little, because after eleven years he had hoped the Professor would trust him enough to tell him things like that—but it was the Professor’s right to tell him in his own time, and so Alan wasn’t going to press the issue.)

But while he hadn’t minded it before, he was outright glad for it now. On their third day in Alola Manon had accidentally changed the password on the Professor’s laptop through a means none of them, Manon herself included, could identify. As a result of none of them being able to figure out what she had changed it to, Clemont had booted the laptop from a program on his USB drive to get the new password (which was, incidentally, a string of gibberish that made it look like Manon had assaulted the keyboard with her elbow at some point in the accidental password changing process) so that the Professor could get back into his user account and change the password back to what it was supposed to be.

And that was what Alan was taking advantage of now, Manon’s clumsy computer handling having paid off in his favor.

After locking the USB drive into the port at the base of the computer terminal, Alan shut down the computer and then booted it again, this time booting it from the program Clemont had installed on the USB. Just as it had when booted on the Professor’s laptop, the program brought Alan to a makeshift desktop interface, and in the top right of the screen a little window appeared that showed all of the user accounts currently installed on the computer terminal, as well as a field next to each one that, while presently empty, was labeled ‘NT pwd.’ Alan smiled, and folded his arms loosely across his chest as he waited.

It didn’t take long.

Thanks to Clemont’s ingenious programming, not five minutes passed before Alan had the passwords to all three user accounts on the computer. He slipped the USB drive back into his pocket before he booted the computer terminal once more, and this time, when presented with the login screen, he signed in under the user account ‘branchchieffaba’ with the password ‘MJZGC3TDNAQGG33NNVQW4ZDFOIQGS3RAMNUGSZLG.’ The password was long, cumbersome, and pretentious, but the second he hit ‘ENTER’ the words ‘Logging In . . .’ appeared on the screen, accompanied by a small buffering wheel. He smiled. Long, cumbersome, and pretentious though that password might have been, it was still going to give him exactly what he needed in the end.

Though the Aether Foundation’s employees (or this one, at the very least) seemed intent on making their systems difficult to crack for the average user, navigating the computer interface was just as easy as any other once Alan was in—easier, even, given how clearly each folder was named, and how most of them were scattered across the desktop. Alan sought out an employee list first, scanning down the list of names, titles, and ID photos to make it easier for him to bluff should he come across any Aether employees during his investigation, and then brought up a map of the facility so he wouldn’t have to waste his time wandering any longer. A disconcerted feeling flashed through him the moment he laid eyes on the map, and though it took him a moment to notice why, when he did, he frowned.

From what he had been able to tell through both the tour Lusamine had given him and Manon and his aerial reconnaissance, Aether Paradise consisted of a single level facility broken up into several wings. The floor map, however, showed two separate facilities. The map of the main facility was easy enough to pick out; he was able to identify the room he was currently in, as well as the corridors that would lead to the sanctuary wing that Lusamine had given him a tour of. As he had thought, both the laboratory wing and the sanctuary wings were all part of the same, ground level facility. There was nothing out of the ordinary there.

But that was only the first facility on the map. Located on the same page within the same .pdf was a secondary facility—a second floor, it looked like, labeled ‘BF’ in response to the first facility’s (or floor’s, he supposed) ‘TF.’ The second floor hosted a new set of corridors and rooms, some of which were labeled as secondary laboratories, another of which was labeled ‘arena,’ and still others of which were labeled with acronyms such as ‘C.H.F’ or ‘H.C.’ But although the second map was listed as a secondary floor, there were no stairs marked on either map, no elevators, no—

Alan paused, drawing back slightly as realization hit him as quickly as a flick on the ear.

There were no stairs and no elevators, but there  _were_ warp panels labeled on the map—specifically, one at each of the facility. That meant that, rather than necessarily being a second  _floor_ , BF was located elsewhere.  _Where_ elsewhere, Alan wasn’t exactly sure; the map didn’t say, and he hadn’t done enough study into warp panel technology to see how far a warp panel could necessarily take a person. Devon Corporation utilized warp panel technology, he was fairly certain, and so if he called Steven he could probably get at least a guesstimate as to how far BF was located from TF—but that could wait. It wasn’t an answer he needed immediately, and certainly not when an Aether Foundation employee could walk in on him at any moment. He tucked the question away in the back of his mind, looked at the maps for another second or two to make sure he had them down, and then closed the .pdf to scroll through the rest of the files on the computer.

Most of the files were mundane; there were employee record charts, budget sheets for everything from the cost of maintaining Aether Paradise to the cost of supplying Professor Kukui’s school with Z-Rings and other necessary equipment, and medical charts for the pokémon they cared for in the sanctuary wings of the facility. Even with the thought that the folders might have been given ordinary file names to dissuade anyone from investigating them causing him to open more than one budget folder just to make sure, none of the folders in the computer’s primary drive seemed to contain anything suspicious. He sighed again, frowning, as he moved the mouse cursor up to the red X to close the Explorer window—and frozen when his eyes landed on a folder labeled ‘Project Alkahest’ located near the bottom of the list.

Alan didn’t know what ‘Project Alkahest’ was, but he did know that it sounded a lot more interesting (and potentially more suspicious) than budget and medical charts.

He swiped the mouse arrow over to the folder and double-clicked to open the folder. It was filled to bursting with information. One glance at how small the scrollbar in the folder got told him that he wouldn’t have time to read everything right then, and a cursory glance over the documents contained within told him that he didn’t necessarily have to; there were, after all, a couple obligatory budget spreadsheets contained within the folder that Alan knew weren’t really pertinent to his investigation. But even a single glance told him that Project Alkahest was something that warranted deeper investigation, and so he pulled his PokéNav Plus from his pocket, activated the Bluetooth, and—once the computer recognized his PokéNav Plus as removable storage—began copying the Project Alkahest folder onto it. Due to the size of the folder, he wasn’t surprised when a progress window appeared on the screen, a green bar slowly inching toward the goal line as the files were copied over.

While he waited, Alan began to peruse the contents of the folder. One document, labeled ‘mvrs.pdf,’ explained the theoretical probability of multiple universes (termed ‘worlds’ in the document) existing overtop the present one (dubbed the ‘prime world’ by the author), evidence for which was laid out in several mathematical and scientific formulas accounting for universal resonance, particle, and string theory (as well as historical record found in regions such as Hoenn, wherein it was apparently believed that there was a world identical to the prime world excepting the existence of primal reversion or mega evolution). The document went on to explain that the boundaries between the worlds was typically both indistinguishable and untouchable, but that Project Alkahest was devoted to not only revealing the boundary between the prime world one other (the ‘ultra world,’ according to the document), but using that boundary to create a Gate between them.

Another document, this time labeled ‘AZOTH.pdf,’ contained information that, by and large, Alan already knew. It detailed the 3,000 year Kalos war, and the creation of the ancient (so-called ultimate, though calling it such put a bad taste in his mouth) weapon that had ended it. The document explained how the weapon had utilized the life force of thousands of pokémon to grant it power, and how that energy source was comparable to the energy expelled by mega evolution (and how it, in turn, differed from the natural energy used to trigger primal reversion in pokémon such as Kyogre and Groudon). The Aether Foundation, it seemed, had considered using the energy spawned by mega evolution to further Project Alkahest’s aims, but ultimately found it wouldn’t suit their purposes.

 _‘While Devon Corporation’s Infinity Energy is useful for powering human technology,’_ the document read, ‘ _we will have to examine alternate sources of energy in order to open the Gate necessary for the completion of Project Alkahest.’_

Alan frowned, his mouse cursor once again hovering over the red X to close the document.

_Devon Corporation?_

He scanned the document again, reading it more carefully this time. Within the document, the Aether Foundation equated the energy used to power the ancient weapon—the energy gleaned from the souls of dead pokémon—to something known as Infinity Energy, which was apparently created and harnessed by Devon Corporation. Alan wasn’t familiar with the term; for as much use as he got out of the PokéNav Plus that Steven had given him, he wasn’t too well-versed in Devon Corporation’s other products, particularly since he had spent so little time in Hoenn. Whatever the case, he didn’t think the Aether Foundation was a very trustworthy source of information in this regard. Whatever Infinity Energy was, he was sure there was more to the story than what they had contained in the .pdf, and resolved to ask Steven about it when he had the chance (which was not, he had to tell himself firmly, right that second, for although it would be a decent hour in the afternoon in Hoenn, the middle of a computer room in Aether Paradise was not an appropriate time to call Steven up for a chat about his company’s technology).

Alan closed ‘AZOTH.pdf’ and was about to open a document labeled ‘lapisnoster.pdf’ when a sub-folder near the bottom labeled ‘The Chimera Project’ caught his eye. Alan frowned, and chewed the inside of his cheek. The moment he laid eyes on the folder he felt a sudden jolt in his chest, as if he had found exactly what it was that he had been looking for. But the feeling was cold, somehow—cold and sharp, and his pulse suddenly had all the agility of a startled rabbit.

But he was here for a reason. A glance at computer’s clock told him that it was just after two a.m. by that point, and he wasn’t standing in one of the Aether Foundation’s computer rooms at two a.m. so that he could purposefully ignore the information he had gone in there to get. He took a deep breath to quell the anxiety that was throwing his heart into a frenzy, and double-clicked the sub-folder to open it.

Like the primary folder, the sub-folder for The Chimera Project contained a host of documents (one of which, he rolled his eyes upon seeing, was yet  _another_ budget sheet, something that he felt had to be doing more harm than good at this point). A few of the .pdfs were purely informational, such as one (labeled ms.pdf) that explained the purpose behind creating sentient, organic life, part of which was based on supposed historic precedence (the creation of sentient life, the document claimed, was something that scientists had endeavored to do for centuries and had, in a few known cases such as The Cinnabar Massacre of 1990, succeeded in doing). The document went on to say that the creation of organic sentient life would take the Aether Foundation—and humanity as a whole—one step closer to true enlightenment and would place them ever-closer to being supreme beings, and that The Chimera Project was the foremost way they sought to complete that necessary step.

Another document, meanwhile (labeled process.pdf), went deeper into the specifics of the project, and the more Alan read, the tighter he squeezed the mouse in his hand, to the point where his knuckles began to ache. ‘The Chimera Project,’ it seemed, wasn’t simply a fancy name playing on the mythology behind the word. The Aether Foundation, at least according to the files they had stored in the project’s subfolder, aimed to use biological science (or, as their insistent terminology had it, alchemical transmutations) to create  _actual chimeras_. The missives littered throughout the subfolder in terms of creating sentient organic life were dangerous enough; it was because of the very same Cinnabar Massacre of 1990 they cited that most regional governments around the world had outlawed the practice of gene splicing as it pertained to creating new organic, sentient life. After the scientists of Cinnabar Island, Kanto had participated in gene splicing experiments in an effort to clone the legendary pokémon Mew—an experiment which, although successful according to journals recovered from the scene, claimed the lives of every scientist in the building and numerous civilians in the surrounding area—the Kanto League had placed a blanket ban on cloning and gene splicing experiments that was quickly adopted by Johto, Hoenn, Sinnoh, and later Unova and Kalos. Virtually every region in the world that operated under the League structure had followed Kanto’s League in instituting similar bans. It didn’t mean that every citizen in every region followed the law, of course—and some, such as Hoenn’s Weather Institute, got around the limitation by creating artificial life such as castform via means other than gene splicing—but so far the world had yet to face another tragedy comparable to The Cinnabar Massacre of 1990, and so the law did seem to be working for the most part.

Except, it seemed, in the Alola region.

With everything else he had been focused on in the past handful of days, Alan had neglected to do more research into Alola’s system of government. Or more like, he figured finding out the chain of command within Alola could wait until he determined whether or not the Aether Foundation was up to anything malicious. But now, examining the documents they had contained within The Chimera Project sub-folder, he wasn’t sure what the right course of action was. It went without saying that there were ethical concerns when it came to gene splicing; past tragedies aside, Alan’s own curiosity about various biological sciences had led him to study up on it a bit in the past, and from what he had read some methods of gene splicing caused harm (and, in some cases, even death) to all parties involved save the scientist conducting the experiments. Depending on how the Aether Foundation was going about their little project, their outward presentation of providing a sanctuary for pokémon could be nothing more than a smokescreen to cover up the torture chambers they had tucked away wherever BF was located.

But the ethical dilemma aside, one thing Alan did know about Alola’s government was that it didn’t operate under a League structure—and, in that, he wasn’t sure what  _Alola’s_ laws on gene splicing were. For all he knew, however unethical the Aether Foundation’s practices may have been, they might not have been illegal. Even if he did report it, there was a chance nothing would be done about it. And if he had no proof that pokémon were actually suffering as a result of their experiments, then there was even less chance that anyone within Alola’s government or law enforcement would take him seriously.

Alan gritted his teeth, closed the .pdf, and opened a spreadsheet (labeled cc.xlsm) instead.

If it was evidence he needed, then it was evidence he would get, but he would need to take things one step at a time.

The spreadsheet he opened was, if the description was to be believed, a list of all the chimeras the Aether Foundation had created. The list was sorted via date of creation, and contained the names, pokémon used in creation, and current status and location of each chimera within the facility. Alan scanned the list, feeling sickened and at times bewildered by the different pokémon they had combined to create different chimeras, and every nerve in his body froze when he reached a name in the center of the list:

**TYPE:NULL**

“Null?” he whispered, and he wanted nothing more than to share a glance with Lizardon—to share this information with him, even though he knew that calling Lizardon out of his pokéball right then would have been a mistake. “As in . . . no, it can’t . . .”

There were no pictures contained within ‘cc.xlsm,’ but the pokémon whose genes were listed in Type:Null’s creation (absol, for instance, and beyond all rhyme or reason  _Arceus_ ) put the image in his mind anyway. The fact that Type:Null’s current status and location were both labeled ‘MISSING’ didn’t help matters. Type:Null had to be Gladion’s Null. It had to be. Null was a chimera stolen from the Aether Foundation, which explained both the Aether Foundation’s determination to hunt Gladion down, as well as Gladion’s poor (to put it mildly) opinion of them.

But then, that begged the question: How did Gladion managed to steal Type:Null in the first place? And if Type:Null was one example of a chimera that they had, what did that say about the others?

The progress bar finally vanished from the screen, signaling the end of the file transfer. Alan turned off the Bluetooth function on his PokéNav Plus and dropped it back in his pocket. The safest move to make, he knew, would be to get out of there; now that he had all of their files on his PokéNav Plus, he could borrow the Professor’s laptop to continue sorting through them at the cabana. He had a feeling the Professor would let him, particularly since Alan would make good on his promise and show the Professor what he had discovered when he did. They could also figure out which governmental authorities, if any, to contact about the Aether Foundation at that time.

On the other hand, although he now had the Aether Foundation’s project files on his PokéNav Plus, Alan still felt that it wasn’t enough. He now knew where the chimeras were being held. He knew exactly how to get to them, too, given that he had looked at the map before. It was one thing to know that the Aether Foundation had actual, living chimeras somewhere within their facility. It was another thing to see them with his own eyes. If he saw them, he would be able to give the Professor a better description of them. If he saw them, it would make for a stronger case if they did have to bring this case before any sort of law enforcement. If he saw them . . .

Alan logged out of the account he had used to access the computer terminal, and then shut it down entirely before he left the room, shutting the door quietly behind him. The bright, fluorescent lights of the hallway were almost painfully blinding after the darkness of the computer room, but he ignored it as he took a sharp right and started making his way toward the warp panel that would take him from TF to BF.

He wasn’t going to stay for much longer. All he needed was one look. One look with his own eyes to determine just how unethical the Aether Foundation’s gene splicing experiments were—to determine just how much the chimeras (and, potentially, the pokémon used to create them) were suffering, and if there was anything at all he could do to help them if so.

Alan passed a few employees on his way to the warp panel, but much like Lysandre’s scientists and Team Flare operatives, none of them spared him more than a passing glance as he wound his way through the corridors, occasionally pausing just long enough to bring up the map again in his mind’s eye to make sure he was going in the right direction. The room containing the warp panel was empty when he found it, and similarly, when he activated it and transported himself to BF (an uncomfortable sensation that made him feel as if every molecule in his body was broken down and reassembled somewhere else), the room that he was transported into was entirely empty as well, and noticeably colder than the rooms up above.

He scowled as he shoved his hands into the pockets of his lab coat.

As far as he was concerned, a place being unnecessarily cold was  _always_ a bad sign.

Like TF, the corridors of BF consisted of polished, gleaming chrome. And if the corridors of TF had felt empty (even if most of the rooms Alan had passed while walking the halls had not been), then the corridors of BF seemed intent on making him aware that he was completely and utterly alone. That thought was ridiculous, he knew; Lizardon’s pokéball was in the right pocket of his lab coat, and so long as Lizardon was with him then he would never, not  _ever_ be alone. But the corridors of BF felt weighted with an oppressive, yet somehow omniscient, silence, as if despite the lack of another soul or any security cameras that he could spot his every move was being observed by some mute presence he couldn’t see. Alan hastened his pace through the corridors, and was careful to move on the balls of his feet in an effort to muffle his footsteps.

While the corridors of BF matched the corridors of TF, the rooms were another story—or at least, the room containing the chimeras was another story despite how the maps hadn’t seen fit to mark any sort of distinction between them. The moment he stepped over the threshold into the chimera holding room the motion sensor lights flickered to life, revealing a room that was three times the size of any of the rooms above. The floor and walls in this room were comprised of concrete, not unlike the stockrooms of most retailers, and while there were long, metal tables in the center that held various instruments, charts, and other equipment, the main point of interest in the room rested in the cells that lined the walls.

“Cells,” Alan thought, was putting it gently. “Cells” was the word that the Aether Foundation had used in its documents describing the containment facilities for the chimeras, but the structures that lined the walls from the doors to the very back of the room were better described as cages. Each individual cage reached floor-to-ceiling, and while the width of the cages wasn’t as impressive, it at least didn’t look as if most of the chimeras were being crushed by the size of their prisons. Each cage had solid metal walls on either side, but the doors that faced the center of the room were barred. It was for this reason that Alan was able to get a glance at each chimera as he passed by its cage, at least as much as the light in the room would allow. Bright though it was, most of the chimeras had pulled away from it the second the lights flickered on, and now cowered at the very backs of their cages as he passed by their doors. They weren’t entirely silent—he heard claws scraping against metal flooring in some of the cages, could hear labored breathing coming from others, heard feathers rustling in some and the sound of tails accidentally thumping against bars in another—but not a one of them so much as sniffed in his direction as he passed. Maybe he was biased, but he thought the silence sounded an awful lot like fear.

He made it to the middle of the room before he crouched down in front of one of the cages to try and get a better look at the chimera contained within. He had chosen the cage at random, but the second he laid eyes on the creature inside it, he felt he had made the right choice. He couldn’t pin a name to this particular chimera (though thinking back over ‘cc.xsml’ again, he thought Type:Ignis was as good a guess as any given the red and orange markings), but that didn’t matter very much to him. What did matter was that the chimera was, like the others, huddled in a trembling ball of fur and scales at the very back of its cage. But as terrified as it looked, it also looked pained. The eyes that gazed at him from the shadows were glazed over, pitiful looking with the way its ears were pressed back against its skull and its snout rested on large, scaled forepaws. The light couldn’t reach the chimera very well, but Alan could still tell that it was having difficulty breathing. Setting aside the way each breath stuttered through its body like an engine struggling to start, he could hear a whistling wheeze through its nose every time it inhaled. Alan moved a little closer to the door, and when he did a weak whine escaped the chimera’s throat. Alan felt his heart splinter.

“Hey,” he whispered, and he poked his fingers through the bar of the cage. The chimera didn’t move. “It’s all right, I won’t hurt you. I’m here to help, I promise.”

The chimera lifted its head, and after staring at him morosely for a second, slowly started to drag its body toward the door of its cell.

“That’s it,” Alan said, and he gave the chimera an encouraging smile. Its snout (so much like a growlithe’s, even if its eyes were all houndour—he’d recognize eyes like that anywhere) wiggled as it sniffed him out. “You can do it. Just a little farther, all right?”

“And just who the hell are you?”

The second the new voice—loud and sharp as it was—cut through the silence in the room, the chimera leaped back to its original position with such speed and force that the entire cage rattled. It wasn’t the only one; so many chimeras jumped at once that the room was suddenly full of the sounds of bodies clashing against metal and startled, pained yelps. Alan himself jumped to his feet and whipped around to face the door, his fingers snapping into fists as he eyed the person who had spoken.

The man who had entered was at a point in his life that Alan felt was best described as either “mid-life crisis” or “pretentious to the point of embarrassment.” Though he was dressed in all white as most Aether Foundation employees were, the man’s excuse for a lab coat had a collar so large that it flared up to reach the back of his head on one side, and drooped so ridiculously on the other that the end of it touched his ribs. His glasses were not much better. Though the shape of them suggested they were supposed to imitate laboratory safety goggles, that was just it: they held the appearance of safety goggles, but none of the practicality. Lurid green and huge though they were, they weren’t nearly secure enough on his face to actually shield his eyes from harmful liquid or debris. About the only thing they succeeded in doing was drawing attention away from the man’s obviously receding hairline.

But as ostentatious and overall awful as the man’s appearance was given his position within the Aether Foundation, that wasn’t as important as his identity. Going based on the employee list Alan had looked at before, the man glaring at him from the doorway was none other than the branch chief of the Aether Foundation—a man named Faba. Alan didn’t know the specifics of every one of Faba’s responsibilities, but he was smart enough to know that it was unlikely he would be able to bluff the branch chief into thinking he was a newly hired employee. At the very least, he wouldn’t if he tried to be too specific about it.

“No one in particular,” he said, and he slipped his hands into the pockets of his lab coat as he turned away, palming Lizardon’s pokéball. The room was large, but with the tables in the center he didn’t think Lizardon would be able to battle comfortably. Still, better safe than sorry. “Just a researcher, passing through.”

“Is that so,” Faba said. He strode into the room, the door swinging shut behind him, and Alan locked his jaw as the chimeras tried to squeeze themselves against the backs of their cages as Faba passed. “That’s funny, because this isn’t exactly a place most people can  _pass through_. This tends to be more of a place you get to  _deliberately_. A place you go through  _on purpose_.”

“Really,” Alan said. He made a show of looking at the other cages, and kept his tone as light and casual as he could. “Imagine that.”

“Yeah. Imagine it.” Faba’s tone was tart, and not at all amused. That was fine by Alan; he wasn’t feeling very amused himself. He looked back over as Faba walked along one of the center tables in the room, and noted that Faba had not once looked away from Alan. “Imagine my surprise when I went to access my user account to get some work done and found someone else was already logged into it. Imagine my surprise when I finally got in and saw how many documents had been open recently—documents that, prior to tonight, hadn’t been touched in months. Imagine my surprise when I saw the warp panel activate not ten minutes after that.”

Alan pretended to consider it for a moment before he said, “I imagine that must have been pretty shocking.”

“It was.” Faba smiled, and maybe it was the fault of the glasses, but it didn’t look like his smile reached his eyes. “But as  _shocking_ as all that was, I think I’ve got a pretty good grasp on the situation now, Sonny Jim. And seeing as how I do, I can tell you one thing you’re not, along with two things you are, and one you’re about to be.”

Given how very obviously busted he was, Alan thought Faba probably  _did_ have a good enough grasp on the situation—at least a good enough one to make it likely that the Aether Foundation enforcers had already been alerted to his presence, and were likely waiting outside the doors to arrest him as they spoke. There was a very good chance he was going to have to fight his way out of this situation, and he was incredibly thankful now that he had the foresight to copy the Project Alkahest folder onto his PokéNav Plus when he did. If nothing else, it would make it easier for him to plead his case when the Aether Foundation no doubt turned him over to the police. All the same, Faba wasn’t arresting him immediately, and Alan had to admit that he was a little curious about where Faba was going with his taunts. So rather than release Lizardon immediately, he said, “Oh? And what would all of those things be?”

Faba snorted. “Well, for one, you’re  _not_ ‘just a researcher, passing through.’” Faba affected a mocking voice that he clearly thought was supposed to be an imitation of Alan’s, yet Alan thought sounded much more like a vocal caricature of a teenager. “You’re a snot-nosed smart-ass, but you’re sure as hell not a researcher of any kind. I don’t care what costume shop you pulled that lab coat from.”

“Excuse me,” Alan said indignantly, “but I’ve been employed as—”

“And as for what you are—well, that’s one of the things. A snot-nosed smart-ass who somehow found his way in here, but sure as hell isn’t going to find his way out, which leads me to the second thing you are: sorry. And as for what you’re about to be?” Faba smacked his hand against the bottom of the table, and a series of metal clicks rang through the room as the barred doors in front of the chimera cages swung slowly open. Alan spun around to watch each door open, though none of the chimeras within moved an inch. “Well, given the time of day, I’d say you qualify as a very light breakfast.”

“You’re joking.” Alan turned back to glare at Faba, whose leer didn’t fade even as he pulled something from the pocket of his flashy coat and put it to his lips. “These chimeras aren’t in a fit state to do anything, much less attack me. They’re either sick or injured, and they’re  _definitely_ scared. Whatever you’ve done to them, they—”

A sudden cacophony erupted from the cages. On instinct Alan clapped his hands over his ears to try and muffle the noise, even as he looked around in time to see most of the chimeras scramble from their cages, hackles raised and tails lashing, feathers and fur puffed in clear agitation. Their eyes were bright, wild; several staggered as they exited their prisons and most were breathing heavily, but all of them had their hungry eyes pinned on him.

Alan whipped back around to face Faba as he demanded, “What did you do to them?”

“I just told them it was dinnertime. Breakfast. Whichever.” Faba laughed, and returned the item—the  _whistle_ , Alan realized now—to his pocket. “As far as they’re concerned, you’re just a  _meal_ passing through, Sonny Jim. And by the way, I recommend you start doing that. Passing through, I mean. Moving. Running. Or you’re about to be a whole lot sorrier than I at first gave you credit for.”

Alan looked back to the chimeras—and, specifically, to the one he had been reaching out to before. It stumbled toward him, breathing hard, saliva dripping from its mouth. He reached out his hand toward it, palm up, slowly, gently—

The chimera lunged, fire lacing around its fangs, and it was only by virtue of the reflexes he had drilled into himself during his years in Lysandre’s service that he managed to yank his arm out of the way just before the chimera’s fangs connected. But that one attack was the trigger; as a mob the rest of the chimeras pounced toward him, snarling and crying out in various degrees of aggression and distress; and Alan, knowing that there was no room for Lizardon to fight all of them and no chance for him to calm them down without fulfilling Faba’s sadistic prophecy, spun on the ball of his foot and bolted for the door.

The right way back to the warp panel was to hang a left out of the chimera room, take another left upon reaching the end of the hall, take a right at the end of  _that_ hall and then enter the second door down on the left. Alan knew this—he could visualize the map in his mind’s eye, still, and even if he had been unable he remembered enough to retrace his steps. But none of that mattered as he threw himself through the doors and—in a moment of blindness where his only thought pertained to putting as much distance between him and the voracious chimeras pursuing him as possible—made a sharp right and sprinted down the hall. It was a stupid, stupid decision, and one he regretted the  _second_ he made it and realized what he had done—but then, it hardly counted as a decision, hardly counted as a  _thought_ as he ducked beneath a Flamethrower that avoided singeing his hair off, but succeeded in blasting against the wall at the opposite end of the corridor and making the chrome paneling glow bright red as it partially melted. He skidded to avoid crashing into both the wall and the newly heated piece of paneling and made another hard right down the next hallway, the chimeras scrambling over themselves and each other as they hastened to follow, barking and snarling and yowling in agitation, hunger, and rage.

But he wasn’t dead yet. He could still make it back to the warp. Not the way he had originally come, no—there was no way to make it past the chimera pack, and not enough room for Lizardon to comfortably fight against them (and not enough time, either, for him to stop running and form a strategy for the too-narrow corridors that would let both him and Lizardon escape a battle like that unscathed). He could still visualize the map, even as he took a left at random to avoiding leading the chimeras around in a semi-circle that would likely end in a dead end (literally) for him. If his position on his mental map was accurate (and gods, he needed it to be accurate), then the T-shaped intersection they were coming up on led to a storage room on the left, and the arena on the right. There was another set of doors on the other side of the arena that would loop back around to the wing of BF that housed the warp panel. If he could just make it through the arena—

Rather than turn, Alan dodged to the right and spun the second his foot made contact so that he could bolt for the set of double-doors at the end of the hall that led to the arena. The half-second longer he spent running straight at the wall rewarded him; the chimeras, not anticipating his dodge out of the way, crashed into the walls and tripped over one another as they attempted to untangle from the pile-up they’d landed themselves in. The distance between them widened, and Alan ran hell-for-leather at the doors, the motion sensor light above them flashing green as he came within range and causing the metal doors to slide open—

Alan threw himself across the threshold, and the moment he crossed it the door slammed shut behind him. The chimeras who had succeeded in separating themselves from the pack quickly enough to charge after him were a few seconds too slow; they crashed bodily into the door, their howls of pain, confusion, and fury audible even over the sound of flesh and bone meeting steel. Nothing short of relief flooded Alan at the sound, but even as he took a second to catch his breath and thank whoever had designed the facility that the motion sensor apparently had a delay (or that the door locked after recognizing an entrant), he still felt a pang of sympathy for the creatures on the other side.

He had no intention of being their breakfast, but that didn’t mean they deserved to suffer.

Now that the chimeras were no longer three steps from devouring him, Alan took a minute to survey the room he found himself in. When he had first noticed the arena marked on the map, he had assumed that it would be a battle arena built to League regulations: concrete or steel rectangular walls, and a floor that was either hard-packed dirt or concrete as well to give the pokémon that battled on it good traction and even footing. The floor would be unmarred save for the regulatory boundary lines that marked where each trainer was supposed to stand as much as they marked the center of the field where the pokémon would duke it out. It was true that the Alola region didn’t function under the League system, but the moment Alan saw that they had an arena within the BF section of their facility, that was the first assumption that sprang to his mind and he hadn’t thought to dash it.

But rather than a battleground that would stand up against League regulations, the arena Alan found himself in was massive, pure white from floor to ceiling, and rounded. The walls curved and combined with a domed ceiling (or what little Alan could see of it, anyway, given how the very top of it was shrouded in shadow) to give the room a spherical appearance. Windows lined the walls on the left side at the base of the domed ceiling; the windows were too high up for him to get a good look through the glass, but from what he could see they looked like the windows to a spectator room of sorts, not unlike the one Lysandre had watched him from at Fleur-De-Lis Laboratories during the mega evolution gauntlet. His throat suddenly dry, Alan tore his eyes away from the window, and looked to the opposite side of the room instead. There was, as the map had shown, a set of doors on the other side of the arena; but what the map hadn’t bothered to mark was the cavernous opening just to the right of the other set of doors, inside of which Alan could hear guttural breathing, and—before he could so much as take a step across the room himself—slow footfalls so heavy that each one made the room quake.

Alan stood, frozen, for just a second. The footsteps—for that was what he knew they were, somehow, even if he didn’t know  _how_ he knew, and even if he didn’t  _want_ to know that despite how he  _did_ —were slow and rhythmic; his pulse timed itself to them, each thud in his chest painfully in-sync with each pounding beat against the floor, but as his heart pounded in his ears, Alan could hear it beating the same word into his brain again and again:  _Run. Run. **Run!**_

His nerves were on fire as he pushed himself forward, starting across the room at first a brisk walk, and then an outright jog. Even if it wasn’t set up the same as a League stadium, length-wise it was still about the same size, and so even though he forced himself into a sprint to match the hastening footsteps of whatever behemoth was emerging from the opening by the exit, he only made it halfway across the room before the creature finally stepped out from the maw of its cave and reared not one, but  _three_ gargantuan heads in the blindingly bright lights of the room.

The beast—no, chimera, it was another chimera, he was sure of it—was at least as tall as Primal Groudon, if not taller. Like most of the other chimeras Alan had seen, this one was quadruped; its massive forelegs resembled a pyroar, whereas its hind legs were closer to that of a houndoom. Each of the chimera’s three heads was an odd cross between (if he had to guess) an aerodactyl and a tyrantrum, and it had a tail that looked nearly as long as the chimera was tall, and about as robust as Prism Tower. The chimera was covered, from its back all the way down its tail, in what looked like metal plating; but as it crossed the room to stand between Alan and the doors on the other side, Alan saw the steel shift and catch the light. Rather than a solid plate, it looked more like a coat of quills.

As it emerged from its den, the chimera plodded over to stand between Alan and the exit. With how languidly the chimera moved, it might have been coincidence. For just a moment, Alan could believe that perhaps the chimera wasn’t blocking his exit deliberately. Perhaps, if he asked nicely, the chimera might even let him pass without a fight.

But once it stood before the exit, its tail slowly swishing across the floor to thump against the wall hard enough to make the room rattle despite how casually the chimera had flicked it, all three heads turned to him. Three sets of eyes, all six of which were an odd mishmash between reptilian and avian, focused squarely on him. And as Alan stared up at the beast that only had eyes for him, one of the heads began to raise its hackles over yellow, pointed teeth.

On instinct, Alan walked backward until his back hit the doors that he had entered through. The chimera pack on the other side had either left or gone entirely silent; not a peep could be heard from them through the steel. Unfortunately, the door didn’t open, either. Either the motion sensor had broken when the chimeras had body slammed the door, or the door was perma-locked from his side. Either way, with his original door locked and refusing to budge, the only exit was the one the three-headed chimera was guarding. That meant that his only options were to either get past the chimera or die.

Alan took a deep breath, and glared straight back into one of the chimera’s faces as he reached in the pocket of his lab coat for Lizardon’s pokéball.

The idea of sending Lizardon against the chimera was not one that thrilled him, but he had no intention of dying without a fight.

Lizardon appeared, as he always did, from a shower of light within the pokéball. He wasn’t  _small_ by any stretch; he grew bigger by the day, at least to Alan’s eyes, even if Manon insisted that she couldn’t tell a difference and that he was “as big as ever.” But although Lizardon was far from tiny, he looked it standing before the chimera, which easily towered over him and sniffed two or three times in his direction once he materialized on the field. Lizardon stared right back up at the camera, holding its gaze for a long moment, before he twisted around to look back at Alan. Alan didn’t need Lizardon to utter a word to understand the  _‘are you saying what I think you’re saying’_ look he was receiving. He nodded, and Lizardon flattened his horns against the back of his head.

“I know,” Alan said, “but we only need to distract it long enough to get to the door on the other side. If we can get it to move, we can get out of here, but we’re going to have to fight to do that. Will you fight wi—”

Lizardon snorted, sharp and annoyed, cutting off Alan’s question before he could ask it. Despite the situation, Alan smiled as he stowed Lizardon’s pokéball back in the pocket of his lab coat, and clutched the Key Stone around his neck in a tight fist.

“Right. Thank you. Get ready, then.” Lizardon turned back to face the chimera, but Alan kept his eyes on Lizardon as he otherwise focused on the pendant in his palm. “Key Stone, respond to my heart. Surpass evolution—mega evolve!”

Lizardon roared as radiant light emanated from their matching necklaces, and his scales turned from vivid orange to ink black, his eyes shifting from bright blue to dark red. Brilliant blue flames burst from his mouth, matching the flame that now topped his tail, and without waiting for a cue from Alan he gave his wings several strong beats to push himself into the air, trailing smoke behind him as he arched up toward the chimera’s left-most head. All three heads were focused on Lizardon now, their eyes following his every movement through the air, and Alan flexed the fingers of his left hand.

“Lizardon! Dragon Claw!”

Lizardon’s claws glowed green as he pulled a sharp ninety-degree turn in the air, and raked his claws along the snouts of the left and center heads as he flew past. The chimera reared back, jerking its heads away from Lizardon’s attack, and the third head snapped fiercely at him as he wove around it, his claws barely grazing the underside of its jaw as he swooped by it. But as Lizardon flew behind the chimera to loop around it from the other side, Alan felt his attention momentarily diverted by a flash of gold from the windows along the left wall. He turned, and his stomach dropped as he caught sight of a slender figure with long golden hair standing poised on the other side of the glass.

_Lusamine?_

It was. Even from his distance, he could tell it was her. She was watching him, not unlike Lysandre had during the gauntlet, and had probably been there since the chimera had first seen fit to leave its den. She was standing there, watching him, watching Lizardon—

Alan didn’t swear very often, at least not with words harsher than  _hell_ or  _damn_. But as he tore his eyes away from the windows he could think of a choice expletive to describe his feelings toward Lusamine, and it was one that no doubt would have earned him a disapproving frown (and a scolding, if Manon, Clemont, or Bonnie were around to hear it) from the Professor.

But Lusamine didn’t matter now, and the Professor’s disapproval could wait. The chimera’s left head was still following Lizardon as Lizardon did his best to duck and weave around the chimera’s snapping jaws and claw swipes, but its middle head was alternating attention between Lizardon and Alan himself, and the third head was staring at Alan directly. The chimera was standing up on all four paws now, its body tense, and while it at first looked as though it was reluctant to swing its girth around to enter the fray completely, as the left head swiveled around to try and snatch Lizardon out of the air, the chimera flicked its tail in Alan’s direction—just a flick, nothing more.

A flick was enough.

It was only by the saving grace of the light glinting off steel that Alan saw the attack before it hit him, and he threw himself forward at an angle so that his right palm connected with the floor and his momentum carried him into a forward handspring. The quills—no,  _feathers_ , as from a skarmory—sailed past him, and a sound like stone shattering echoed through the arena and blasted against Alan’s eardrums.

But there was no time to think on it—no time to look back, because as Alan landed on his feet and stood up straight again, he saw Lizardon swivel in the air and barely avoid a snap from one of the chimera’s three heads. That's right—the chimera  _did_  have what looked to be skarmory feathers all over its body, particularly in a spiky line down its back and along its massive tail. Skarmory—steel—at least part of it was steel-type, so that meant—

“Lizardon!” Alan shouted, and he threw his palm forward to indicate the chimera as Lizardon jerked his head to show that he heard. “Flamethrow—!”

A blast of blue fire erupted from Lizardon’s mouth and presumably hit its target, but Alan’s moment of distraction in directing Lizardon cost him dearly. As familiar, blessed heat washed through the arena from Lizardon’s Flamethrower, something hard and heavy (the tail, the chimera’s tail, he took his eyes off the tail for  _one second_ —!) slammed into Alan and sent him flying back across the room. Unlike when Primal Groudon had thrown him across the ice in Hoenn, the sheer force behind the blow this time was such that Alan barely had time to register what happened aside from the crushing pain he felt through his entire upper body when the tail connected, the sudden sensation of being thrown off his feet and blasted back across the room, and the feeling of his back crashing against the wall, his head cracking back against the metal. Distantly, he heard Lizardon cry out; but for a moment everything was painful and dark, and Alan was so dazed that he couldn’t tell if the darkness was because his eyes were closed or his newfound head injury made him lose his vision.

But then there was another roar. Another cry. Another  _scream_ , and that one was Lizardon’s, and that forced Alan to take a ragged, sputtering breath and lift his head, his vision swimming, just in time to see the mega evolution fizzle out as the chimera pinned Lizardon against the floor beneath one of its massive forepaws. Lizardon, his scales now orange and streaked with red, writhed beneath the claws and loosed another high, agonized cry, but the chimera didn’t so much as twitch as he tried to struggle free.

Terror turned Alan’s mind to static, a high-pitched ringing in his ears.

“ _Liz_ —!”

Alan’s voice broke off in gasp as white-hot pain exploded in the left side of his abdomen, and something thick and coppery gurgled up his throat and spilled over his lips as the arm he had outstretched toward Lizardon fell limply by his side. He doubled over, but that only made the pain sharper and more savage, and as he looked down—thick drops of blood falling from his mouth onto the formerly pristine floor, and heavy globs of it splattering down from the wound in his side—he could see why.

He was still upright despite how he had been slammed into the wall, but not through his own strength. When the chimera had fired those steel feathers at him, one of them had connected with the wall at just the right angle to become lodged in it. And when the chimera had smacked him back across the room, he had hit the steel feather at just the right angle to be run through. The only thing still holding him upright was the makeshift skewer pierced through his abdomen, and as dizziness forced him to sag his weight against it, another lash of pain caused him to cough up more blood. Even as he watched the drops sprinkle on the floor, his vision was so badly blurred it was hard to tell what came from his mouth, and what rained from his wound.

Lizardon cried out again, but though his own suffering was thick in his voice, Alan heard the cry for what it was. It was a call of concern—a plea for  _him_  to be all right. He placed his hand on the point of the skarmory feather protruding from his stomach, and squeezed it as he forced himself to raise his head and look over. The room was wavering in and out of focus, but as he watched the chimera removed its paw from Lizardon’s back, and Lizardon—he pushed himself to his feet, gave his wings two strong beats, pushed into the air—

—and was quickly smacked down again, the room quaking with the force of Lizardon’s body hitting the floor, an anguished cry escaping him before he could bite it back. Alan lurched forward without thinking to go help, but the razor edge of the feather sliced against him from the inside, and once again he was left heaving— _retching_ —as black spots exploded in his vision and his body went limp and useless.

He was . . . he was useless. He was useless, and . . . and Lizardon was hurt, Lizardon was going to—

 _No_ , Alan thought, his eyes stinging and his breath hitching just enough to send a renewed wave of torment through his ribs and back.  _Not Lizardon, never Lizardon. Not Lizardon, not Lizardon,_ please  _Xerneas, not Lizardon . . . !_

Alan blinked rapidly to force his vision to at least partially stabilize, and groped at the right pocket of his lab coat. It took several tries, but he finally managed to get his hand inside, his numb fingers clumsily gripping Lizardon’s pokéball. He could recall him. He could recall him, and then . . . then he’d be safe, at least for . . .

But no. He couldn’t.

Even with his vision being what it was, Alan could see that Lizardon was too far away—just out of the pokéball’s range. The chimera wasn’t likely to let him go again, and that . . . that left only one option. Alan had to get to him.

Alan reached behind him, but even that simple act sapped most of his strength and his hand fell limply against the skarmory feather. He licked his lips, took a breath, and then tried to pull the feather free from the wall.

It didn’t budge.

After a few seconds of fruitless tugging, Alan gave up. He had all the strength of a day old skitty—a day old, premature skitty, at that. He couldn’t get the feather free from the wall . . . which meant his only other choice was to remove himself from the feather. When he did, it would be like removing the stopper from a bottle of wine. He would bleed out within minutes.

Alan swallowed, and closed his eyes.

He would bleed out within minutes, but it would only take him  _seconds_ to save Lizardon.

Alan gripped the front of the feather, and with his jaw locked and his teeth clamped tightly together, dragged himself forward along the veritable spike. Agony surged through him from the wound and forced a strangled scream from his throat; his ears pounded as his vision went briefly dark, and a sound that could have been another shout from Lizardon echoed dully in the room. Alan’s own blood ran over his hands and stuck to his fingers, but as he did his best to swallow down the renewed combination of blood and stomach bile that bubbled up his throat so he wouldn’t choke on it, he squeezed the skarmory feather in a tight grip before inching himself along it once more.

For what felt like a century (but couldn’t have been more than a minute) Alan pulled himself along the steel, razor-edged feather in-between periods of nearly blacking out. When he finally reached the final stretch, he gripped the feather behind him, and gave the strongest push he could muster to shove himself off the feather. The moment he was free blood poured freely from his gut, but Alan only had to witness it raining onto the floor for a second before he collapsed face-first. In a bizarre way, it was almost fortunate he was already so badly wounded; he hardly felt it when his body hit the floor.

But there was . . . he couldn’t . . . he couldn’t stop. He was lightheaded; everything in the room looked strangely bright and fuzzy when he forced his eyes open, and it felt as if the room was tilting on its axis. He was . . . he was going to . . .

_Lizardon . . ._

He had to get to Lizardon.

Once more Alan thrusted his hand into the pocket of his lab coat, and forced his weak, rubbery, useless fingers to grip Lizardon’s pokéball. It was easier when he slipped his finger over the center button to maximize it; it couldn’t easily slip through his grip this way, he wouldn’t . . . wouldn’t drop it, wouldn’t fail again, like he . . . always did.

Face down on the floor as he was, his sweaty forehead pressed against the steel, he took as deep of a breath as he could manage and set his jaw again. He had to . . . had to get closer. Just a little closer. A little closer, and then he could recall Lizardon and . . . everything would be all right.

Alan threw his left arm forward, and pressed his fingers into the steel flooring as best he could. Then, with every ounce of strength that he had mustered to pull himself off the skarmory feather, Alan dragged himself forward across the floor, leaving a streak of smeared blood behind him. Unlike last time, this time he didn’t have to contend with the torture of having his body sliced from the inside out; but it was just as grueling as before, just as time consuming, and Alan could no longer make out more than blurred shapes and colors for how badly the room was spinning and his head was throbbing. But even if they were just colors—even if he was dragging himself toward something indistinct, undefined . . . he could still tell which one was Lizardon. He could . . . could tell, could  _sense_ it, knew that Lizardon was there, just beyond his reach, still breathing, and alive, and . . . if he could . . . just a little more . . .

Alan slumped against the steel tiles, unsure of exactly how far he had dragged himself, or how much time had passed. But with nothing more than the remaining dregs of strength his determination provided him, Alan stretched his right arm as far out in front of him as he could, the front of Lizardon’s pokéball aimed at the shape Alan knew—couldn’t see, not really, but  _knew_ —to be his partner and slurred, “Return.”

A flash of red light and a howl of protest from Lizardon told Alan that he succeeded, and despite everything, Alan smiled a little as he clutched Lizardon’s pokéball—now warm, thanks to the dragon inside—to his chest, shielding it from the chimera’s view. Lizardon was protesting . . . but he was safe now. He was safe now, even if Alan . . .

Alan tried to take in another breath, but even with the pain that quaked through him at what should have been a simple action, he felt as if it did very little to help. He transferred Lizardon’s pokéball to his left hand and tried to use his right to push himself up, but he made it no more than slightly shifting his position before he ran out of the energy to move. He was . . . exhausted, but that wasn’t exactly it. He was . . . he was dying, and he knew that—had known it, but . . .

_“I was just being paranoid.”_

_“I wouldn’t call you paranoid—just cautious, and it’s understandable given what you’ve been through. Why don’t we look into them together? That way we can make sure they’re safe, and put your mind at ease.”_

_“No, it’s okay. You should enjoy the rest of our trip; you don’t need to bother yourself with this.”_

_“Alan—”_

_“I’m sure it’s okay, Professor. And if it’s not—if anything comes up, I’ll tell you. I promise.”_

He couldn’t . . . he wasn’t going to . . . he couldn’t keep his promise. He was going to let Professor Sycamore down again, just like always. It had been eleven years since the Professor had taken him in, and he was still nothing more than a couple of broken promises and a handful of disappointments.

“’m sorry,” he mumbled, though the Professor was still safely back at the cabana, sound asleep with Meyer by his side and Gabby no doubt passed out across the foot of the bed. He couldn’t hear the apology he deserved—had no idea where Alan even was, or what was happening . . . and Alan, his mind a haze of static, couldn’t figure out whether that was for the best or not.

Alan didn’t know when he had closed his eyes, or if he even had closed them before everything went dark. He didn’t know when the snarling breaths of the chimera ceased to be audible, and couldn’t piece together why that might be. And in the next second or two, he was no longer aware of anything at all.


End file.
